Mendeley and Citation Style Language

Tools and resources for academic reference management and legal citation formatting

Mendeley Reference Manager

I use Mendeley's reference manager, Web Importer, and Microsoft Word plugin to save papers and then automatically cite them in my articles. This saves me time with Bluebooking and cross-references, streamlining the academic writing process.

Citation Style Language (CSL) for Bluebooking

Most reference managers use Citation Style Language (CSL) to format footnotes. The best Bluebook CSL template was created by Bruce D'Arcus and Nancy Sims. I've made some modifications to their excellent template to better suit legal academic writing needs.

Download Resources

Installation: Mendeley provides a guide on installing citation styles. This template should also work with other reference managers like Zotero, though I haven't tested it extensively.

The Word plugin also uses a file containing abbreviations for the names of periodicals. In Mendeley, you can change the file containing abbreviations by following the directions here (just replace the "Default.txt" file with the one below).

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I add quotations in the Mendeley Word plug-in?

Quotations (and any other additional information) can be included as a suffix.

How do I de-italicize italicized words in titles (like "Cass R. Sunstein, Chevron Without Chevron")?

A hack that sometimes works is to escape the de-italicized word as </i>word<i>.

When I add a quotation as a suffix, parentheses are changed into brackets. What gives?

This is apparently a known bug that Mendeley is working on; I haven't found a way around this and just convert them all manually before publication.